ALLEN — With roughly 88,000 residents, minor league hockey and Arena League football teams, busy shopping areas, a solid economic base and a gee-whiz new high school sports stadium, Allen seems worlds away from the typical small town.

Just don’t tell anyone around here.

A lot of longtime residents say the feel of Allen hasn’t changed much over the years, even as the population swelled exponentially. To some, it still feels like it did in the 1950s and ’60s, when it was home to maybe 400 people.

That’s about half as many as Allen High School’s Eagle Escadrille marching band will put on the field Friday night as the football team opens its season against Southlake Carroll in Allen’s new $60 million stadium.

“We try not to call it ‘a city,’” said Mayor Stephen Terrell. “We try to keep that small-town feel.”

Tom Keener, who has spent 29 years working in Allen, first saw the city from the back seat of the family car around 1960 on the way to visit his grandparents’ farm. He remembers pulling 5-cent Cokes from the icy bin at Dee Angel’s service station on what is now Highway 5.

Despite its growth, he said, Allen remains a very close-knit place.

“When someone gets sick, there’s that phone call thing and soon everybody knows,” Keener said. “My father used to tell me that in a small town, you don’t say anything you don’t want everyone to know, and it’s still that way.”

When Joe Farmer came to town in 1975, Allen was in a growth spurt, with almost 5,000 people. And he met most of them a couple of years later when he went door-to-door during his first campaign for City Council.

“Back then, you may not have known everybody,” the former mayor said, “but you knew enough to have a pretty good feel for what people were thinking.”

Farmer, Keener and many others worked on the city’s first comprehensive plan, “which basically laid out a road map for the community,” said Keener, the cultural arts manager at the city library.

“The bottom line is they wanted growth, but a managed growth that created a tax base and preserved the trees and our green areas.”

City money in the country

The growth came, beginning with the opening of Central Expressway in the early 1960s. But things really took off when businesses like Texas Instruments and Collins Radio created good-paying jobs in North Dallas and Richardson, and people could earn city money living in the country.

Donna Narlock and her family arrived in that 1970s wave when her husband transferred with IBM.

“We’d moved quite a bit,” Narlock said. “And each time we moved about 20 miles out of the city — to the smaller towns, where the prices were cheaper.”

The same thing happened in Texas, but this time for good.

“My two sons went to Allen High School, and three of my grandchildren graduated there, and now my great-granddaughter is in second grade,” she said. “Our family is here, so there’s no sense in moving now.”

Besides, she really likes Allen.

“Allen hasn’t gone ‘big-city’ on us,” she said. “It’s grown well. And our new stadium is the best!”

The railroad’s arrival

Allen traces its history to about 1840, when the first settlers came to the area searching for free land.

But the big change came three decades later, with the Houston and Texas Central Railroad, the vision of city namesake Ebenezer Allen, a transplanted New Englander who recognized the potential of a railroad to expand commerce.

The steam engines of the time were thirsty, so the railroads built stations about seven miles apart to accommodate them.

On Christmas Eve 1873, an H&TC locomotive passed through Dallas and Plano and Allen on its way to Denison, and nudged nose-to-nose with a Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad train that had chugged south from St. Louis.

“That event changed the entire economy of Texas,” said Ken Byler, whose ancestors were among the early settlers.

The railroad created Allen’s first population boom. But it was Central Expressway that transformed a small farming town into one of the country’s fastest-growing cities, Byler said.

Tracking Allen’s population growth is breath-taking. From a low point of about 400 in 1950, Allen exploded to 43,619 by 2000. Over the next 10 years, the city almost doubled in size, to 84,246 in 2010, more than 85,000 in 2011, and approximately 88,000 in 2012, according to city numbers.

Nowadays, the city’s past is best found in its Heritage Village, with churches, brightly painted homes and a plain-faced two-story home built pre-1880 called an “I-house,” which is “very characteristic of frontier architecture,” Keener said.

Today, most of Allen is thoroughly modern. A short stroll from the Heritage Village, kids soar above the city’s skateboard park, or the BMX bike center next door. And across the street, a series of overhead cables hauls wakeboarders through a carefully carved series of waterways.

Poking above the trees is the new $60 million Allen Eagles Stadium that serves as a new focal point for the city, a place where just about everyone considers themselves an “Allen Eagle.”

“That’s right, we do share that identity,” Terrell said. “And we’ve all worked together to build the schools and the parks.

“It’s been a great place to live and a good place to raise a family,” he said. “And that’s a big plus no matter how you look at it.”

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